Big, like the 19-foot-high Daniel Chester French statue in the Lincoln Memorial. Big, like the 150-minute epic biopic "Lincoln" (2012) by Steven Spielberg.

But no artist ever had bigger plans for Lincoln than an actor and filmmaker who hatched the most ambitious Lincoln project of them all right here in North Jersey: Ridgefield Park, to be exact.

Starting Tuesday, Benjamin Chapin's long-forgotten 1917 multi-part silent-screen epic "The Lincoln Cycle" will be returning to its hometown for a series of screenings at the Ridgefield Park Public Library.

Never heard of Benjamin Chapin? Well, that's part of the story.

"He really identified himself with Lincoln," says Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski, who stumbled onto the actor-director-producer-writer, his Bergen County movie studio and his epic "Lincoln Cycle" almost by accident. "He's thinking of something almost Wagnerian — a Lincoln cycle, like The Ring Cycle."

Chapin himself compared the scale of the project to Germany's famous Oberammergau Passion

Play. Apparently, "The Lincoln Cycle" films were meant to be exhibited either as individual shorts or as feature-length programs of three or four segments.

For a project this monumental, which got off to such a splashy start (parts of it played New York's then-biggest movie theater, The Strand, to excellent reviews in 1917), "The Lincoln Cycle" left a surprisingly small footprint. Unmentioned by silent film historians, unseen for nearly a century, "The Lincoln Cycle" films virtually disappeared off the face of the earth.

Virtually, but not actually. In fact, nine of the 11 half-hour movies have been sitting, unnoticed, at the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film & Television Archive for decades. Now, thanks to Koszarski and Donna Rose-McEntee, the local history coordinator of the Ridgefield Park Public Library who reached out to the Library of Congress, eight of the "Lincoln" segments have finally come home.

"The Lincoln Cycle" will be screened on three nights at the library, starting Tuesday, as part of the library's celebrations of the 350th anniversary of New Jersey; further screenings will follow on Aug. 19 and Sept. 9. Koszarski will introduce the films on Tuesday, with silent film pianist Ben Model providing accompaniment on keyboard.

"I don't think people realize we had something like this in our town," Rose-McEntee says. "It's kind of like a hidden gem we unearthed."

It was Koszarski, an expert on the early pre-Hollywood film industry in North Jersey ("Fort Lee: The Film Town"), who alerted local historians to the curious bit of film history in their own back yard. "You would see references in film almanacs," he says. "They would say, 'Lincoln Cycle.' 'Charter Films.' So I had heard about this studio, but I wasn't actually sure where it was. Then I looked at the Ridgefield Park maps and saw it."

Back in 1915, you would have found it on Second Street, corner of Central Avenue in Ridgefield Park (near present-day Hunter Park). Charter Features Co., founded by Chapin, was certainly unique in film history: a studio entirely devoted to movies about Abraham Lincoln.

"He wasn't just trying to make money with Lincoln," Koszarski says. "He's saying Lincoln is the great American story."

The lanky Chapin, originally from Ohio, was a dead ringer for Honest Abe, which may have helped determine his acting career: He impersonated the 16th president for years on the lecture circuit, and in a four-act play he wrote as a vehicle for himself. But he also seems to have been genuinely obsessed with the man.